Category Archives: Mind Management

You know, when I dreamt of being a mom, I had this whole vision for myself. I was going to be the mom who always listened to her kids, who taught them to think and understand, who took them to amazing places and showed them the wonder of the world. I was going to snuggle and hug and never be too busy to hear their needs. This mom wasn’t going to yell or lose her mind when the kids acted up. Nope, I was going to take things in stride and help them see the error of their ways. Then we would go forth, hand in hand to the next adventure.

Right.

I can hear you laughing.

The good news is that in some ways I am the mom I want to be. I trained myself when they were very young to listen to what they were saying and to respond to every coo and babble. Now, it’s hard to tune them out, and sometimes that’s a pain because they don’t need me to listen to every word, and there are four of them and they make lots of noise!. I do give lots of hugs (probably could give more), and I try to hear their needs and meet them when appropriate (there’s a lot of teaching about want vs. need these days). Where I definitely fall short is with losing my temper with them. I haven’t turned out to be that easy-going, laid back, go-with-the-flow mama. Not sure if that missing part is due to nature or nurture – I’m pretty sure it has a lot to do with my personality. I’m generally more intense and ride-or-die than chill. Yelling is something I’ve grown away from. Not that I don’t do it at all, but I’ve learned better ways to get my kids to get back on track. But you will probably get me when I say this: There are some things that they do that take me from zero to sixty in 2.5 seconds. Let talk about it…

My son is in middle school this year. He’s smart, organized, opinionated, talkative, energetic, thoughtful, and generally an incredible young man. I love him to pieces! We do yoga together every morning, he loves to talk with me about the world, and he hasn’t decided he’s to old for my hugs and kisses. But we had a few incidents in the past year with him taking things around the house without asking. Most often, it was chocolate. Specifically, my chocolate.

Some of my stash…

So yes, I’m a certified health and weight loss coach, but I have a love for dark chocolate. Mostly I eat sugar-free dark chocolate or small amounts of high-quality specialty dark chocolate, but on very rare occasions I want to have peanut M&Ms. I chalk it up to childhood memories of candy bowls full of peanut M&Ms in varied colors depending on the season (red and green for Christmas, red pink and white for Valentine’s, and multi for the normal days). Isn’t it funny how we have foods that bring us back to childhood? My husband brought home Krispy Kreme doughnuts the other day (no, I don’t know what possessed him and no, they’re not vegan). I took a bite of one of a classic glazed he was eating and was instantly in my grandmother’s kitchen. My grandmother’s was the only place I ate those doughnuts growing up, so that’s what that taste reminds me of. But I digress.

My chocolate stash used to be on the top shelf of the pantry, both to keep it out of reach of little kids, but also to keep it above my eye level and make me think a little harder before mindlessly munching away. When I found out they were big enough to get it and that they felt that they could help themselves (not ok), I packed it up in a zip-top bag and put it in my closet. In my bedroom.

One afternoon I had a craving for peanut M&Ms, so I went to my stash to get a few. Having been a part of the correction from the pantry chocolate stealing saga, my husband bought me a large bag of M&Ms to replace the pilfered candy. Since I eat 3-4 M&Ms at a time, the bag lasts a long time. The bag felt very light, so I looked inside to see that most of the bag was gone. Do you ever feel like you might have lost your mind? I mean, I couldn’t possibly have eaten all this candy and not realized I was plowing through it, right? What if I had and just was eating mindlessly? No, no, no – I knew that wasn’t it. I’d know if I ate a whole bag of M&Ms. It was time to start questioning children.

After intense inquiry and skillful probing questions, my son confessed to eating my candy. He figured out where I’d stored my stash and had been going into my closet repeatedly to take handfuls at a time. Now, I’ll confess: I may have had an out-of-body experience at this point. I mean, how dare he go into my room when I’m not there (not allowed), sneak into my closet, and take my treats (which I had hidden in the first place because he had been taking them from the pantry!)? I came at him hard, guns blazing. He got an earful about how lying and stealing destroys relationship and how his character needed to be protected and grown intentionally and how hurt I was that he would take from me while I’m continually giving to him. All true, and he needed to hear the impact of his thievery, both on his being and on our relationship.

But in the background was the real reason I was upset. My thoughts about the lying and stealing were much more dark and frightening. My fear came from the thought that this behavior was an indication that he was becoming a thief and a liar, and that one day he’d be stealing TVs and cars and would end up in prison. Then all that brilliance and beautiful personality would become yet another wasted life, and I was the mom who produced this criminally minded child. Yep, I went there, at least in my mind, even though I never said any of it to him. You see, the problem was the emotion that I brought to the situation. It was my fear on top of the situation, not just what happened. My husband and I spent time talking to other parents afterward and heard many similar stories of how their kids behaved at this age. Apparently children go through a stage where if they want something, they take it, even when they know they’re wrong. Of course, they need correction, but the way I did it with a raised voice and blame and negativity wasn’t needed, and it all came from my catastrophic thoughts.

So what do you do when your child does something that threatens you to go right over the edge and lost your mind all over them? I know what I’m going to do. The next time one of my kids does something that tempts me to think that they’re practicing to become a criminal, or that they’ll never graduate from high school with their lack of work ethic, or that they’re going to be living in my house forever because they won’t be able to take care of themselves, I’m going to examine those thoughts. Capturing the thoughts and asking myself if they are true helps me to take a step back. No, I don’t know that they’re going to jail or that they won’t be successful in school or that they’re going to live a miserable life with no real job or direction in their lives. Right now, they’re safe and cared for in my house, and their father and I are here to teach, train, and correct. That’s what parents of children are supposed to do because that’s what children need. When my kids behave in a way counter to what I believe is right, nothing has gone wrong. They haven’t yet learned to behave well, and I have an opportunity to help them. Is it scary and frustrating and tiresome and sometimes downright irritating? Yes, it is. But only because of how I choose to think about it, not because of what they’ve done.

Now I know you might be thinking, “Well, your kid just took some candy. Mine is smoking weed. I have bigger problems than some mental gymnastics can solve.” But I would offer that you have the same problem – your thoughts. You could choose to think of all the folks you know or have heard of who tried weed when they were young and are productive adults today. Or you can think of all the ways your child smoking weed will lead to her dropping out of school, getting pregnant before she’s ready, and how you’ll be raising your grandbaby when all you wanted was to retire. You get to choose how you think. Your thoughts are truly the only thing you control – not your husband, not your boss, not your friends or coworkers, and certainly not your children. You absolutely have influence in all situations, but if your words and actions come from a place of fear and judgment, the response you get from the person you’re trying to control is very likely to be the opposite of what you’d like. Coming from a place of love and compassion is much more likely to be productive. The only way you get to the feelings you want to have is from the thoughts you choose to think. The best news of all is that you are the only one who has control over your thoughts. So practice capturing those thoughts and think the ones that help you on purpose!

And if you need help with this, you’re not alone! Self-coaching is powerful, but having someone else help coach you can get you moving when you’re stuck in your mind. Let me know in the comments below if you have a situation or thought that you can’t seem to shake and I will help!

For those of you who want to click right over to this week’s video on Weight Loss: Going Deeper, here it is! This is the end of the series and for the next four weeks, I’m talking about how understanding your hormones can help you lose weight. Join me!

I’ve been very frustrated lately. Every time I looked at my attitude, I was irritated, annoyed, and short-tempered. It was to the point that I had to take a step back to examine what was going on in my mind. Why was I choosing to feel frustrated?

What do I mean choosing? Here’s the thing: All feelings come from the thoughts we have. The thoughts we have can be conscious or unconscious, which means our feelings come from those conscious or unconscious thoughts. Now, estimates are that we have 40,000-60,000 thoughts a day, most of them unconscious. As much as I make it a practice to manage my thoughts, I’m still not getting all 60,000. So when I notice a thought or feeling pattern produced by my mind, I pay attention.

Yeeessss?

Why would I be choosing frustration? Well, the easy answer is that I’m feeling the pressure of working as a physician during a pandemic, or that I’m concerned about the way our homeschool group is handling safety measures surrounding COVID, or that I’m worn down by all the emotions I feel around the many stories of racial inequity and police brutality against Black people that we keep seeing again and again. To some extent, that explanation is true.

But even if all those issues are weighing on me, that still doesn’t explain why I’m choosing to be frustrated. What it means to be chronically frustrated is that I’m not deciding to deliberately think thoughts that produce an emotion other than frustrated. Let me give you an example. One thought I’ve been thinking about the anti-mask movement is that “It doesn’t make any sense. Don’t people have any sense of community? They should just wear the mask!” The first problem with these thoughts is that I’m arguing with reality. Byron Katie said that you can argue with reality, but you will lose 100% of the time. There’s no upside to this thinking – it won’t change the truth that some people just aren’t going to wear the masks, no matter what logic or science or social responsibility argument is offered to them. My thinking it shouldn’t be this way is a quick trip to nowhere. When I look at some of my thoughts about the other things happening in my life, they end up in a similar dead-end place.

So if there’s no upside to my thoughts and I’m ending up in frustration, and I’m thinking these thoughts over and over again, then I’m choosing to be there. There’s a deeper reason why I’m doing this to myself. When I really get down to it, I’m staying in frustration because I think that being frustrated helps me in some way. My mind says that if I’m frustrated, I’ll work to change things so I don’t have to stay frustrated. Maybe I’ll make a Facebook post or write a blog or make a YouTube video that convinces the world to wear their masks, which causes all racism to vanish, which erases the pandemic from our world. Right – not likely. So I’ve committed myself to misery in frustration without a way to improve any of these situations because I’ve convinced myself that if I’m not frustrated I won’t be motivated to do anything to improve them. The reality is that frustration doesn’t generally produce action. Frustration produces inaction – most times that feeling causes one to do nothing at all other than spin around in the mind with more frustrating thoughts.

So if frustrated is not useful and it’s not actually motivating me to improve our situation AND I’m miserable feeling this way, then what do I do? I need to choose and practice thinking other thoughts. Picking a thought to think is fine, but it won’t become a substitute for the original thought until I practice it over and over. I can think thoughts like, “I choose to wear a mask and protect myself and others”, and “Grown people get to choose how they want to live”, and “I can choose to protect my children however I think is best”, or even “We’ve stayed healthy for six months of this pandemic – what we are doing is working and we will continue”. Those thoughts are more empowering. When I feel empowered, I’m more likely to take action – to write the post, to send the email, to love the people who need me. When I’m frustrated I eat chips and snap at my kids. How does that help anyone?

Put some on a napkin! 

You know, I didn’t realize at first that I believed frustration had a purpose in my mind, that I thought it was a motivator for change. I thought it was equivalent to the feelings of “motivated” or “resolved” or “committed”. I can feel the frustration when it comes up and I know it can’t hurt me. But in the end, it’s not a place I choose to stay because I won’t get where I want to go from frustration. I’m choosing to take frustration as a sign that I’m allowing myself to get distracted, that I’m being waylaid from my goal. Then I practice the thoughts that help me feel resolved and motivated and committed. That kind of thinking – well, that’s what moves us forward!

Have you been aware of the thoughts that are creating your feelings? How are you managing? There’s a lot of great work you can do on your own, but if you’d like help, that’s what a coach is for! Write to me in the comments with questions – I’m here to help!

And for those of you who’ve been looking for it, here’s the 4th class in Weight Loss: Going Deeper – What Should I Eat? This week we’re talking about fat and how you can use it to lose weight. Join me!

Ever have a run of days that just wear you out? That’s how the past week has been. Shoot, sometimes I feel like it’s been the entire past 6 months. Between maintaining a constant level of vigilance at in the office and the hospital to protect myself and my family from COVID to managing my own thoughts about social justice issues to trying to stay engaged in the political conversation in an election year (but not so much that I’m consumed by it), it’s been an effort to stay balanced. But working through the past few days have taught me that it can be easier than I think to get myself on solid ground again…

I had a full day of surgery scheduled at the end of last week. The cases were mostly straightforward, but when you add up the time for the surgeries, the times between cases to get the room reset, and starting around 7 am in the city, it was scheduled to be quite a long day. I found myself wanting to gripe and complain, wondering why I wasn’t able to limit the number of cases that were scheduled for me on a particular day and feeling frustrated that most of these cases were coming to me before I’d had an opportunity to review them and decide if they were appropriate. I began hearing thoughts in my head that sounded faintly familiar but weren’t what I wanted to think. Thoughts like, “This sucks. This isn’t how things should be done. I shouldn’t have to do things this way. If I had control over my own schedule, I’d organize this differently. This is the problem with working for a company.” It took me a minute, but I realized that these were just recycled thoughts from my training years, thoughts I started learning from other med students and residents twenty years ago. Those thoughts were spoken by others, and I learned to think that way about my workdays, that I was under the control of the system and things would be better if I had more autonomy, that I was just a cog in the wheel and who and how I was didn’t matter.

Today I’m in a different situation as an attending physician, but there are situations where working within our healthcare company that I am tempted to fall back into this style of thinking. But I don’t have to, because they’re just the thoughts I’m choosing to think. If I’d know this in training, life (and I!) would have been much more pleasant! When I take control of my thoughts instead of letting the old ones play automatically, I get to choose ones that work for me instead of against me. For example, I chose to think, “I am helping a lot of women today. This is going to be a great day! These cases are going to fly by and besides, these really are straightforward surgeries. I have an excellent assistant and we are going to get in here and get this handled. I’ve got this.” Interestingly, with the exception of an unexpected surprise during my last case, that’s exactly how the day went. The best part was that I didn’t spend the time between each case torturing myself by wishing away the “horrible” day I was having – because I wasn’t having a horrible day at all. I had a great day because I was able to allow it to be that way in my mind. When have you made your own day awful because of how you set your mind against it from the outset?

You can make your own potholes in your mind that trip you up…

My husband decided to take a mini-retreat to celebrate his 20th spiritual birthday this past weekend. And while that was definitely an event worth commemorating, it left me at home with the kids alone with short notice, after I’d already worked the past weekend at the hospital. I had decided in my mind that this weekend would be a break for me, but now I was on the hook for handling the kids. This one I caught upfront before it got too far out of hand. When I started counting up all the meals I’d have to manage and how I thought we’d be enjoying our grown-up TV time together after the kids went to bed and I’d be alone all weekend and I’d have to manage the kid’s messes which irritates the mess out of me, I pulled up short. I didn’t have to go down that rabbit hole. If he was taking a retreat, then I had the option to make it a weekend of drudgery that wore me out by the end, or I could stay with the plan of having a restful weekend. How was I going to do this at home with four kids? By deciding what I would and would not think. I spend so many weeks at work wishing I could be home with them, so now I have a weekend where I can, so I’m going to make the most of it. I also told them Friday night how I expected the weekend to go, and they’re old enough now to understand and manage themselves accordingly (not perfectly, but they try). I relaxed my stance on TV, but I made them finish cleaning up before we sat down to watch anything. I absolved myself from making lunches and told them they were on their own (and even the 7-year-old can make an almond butter sandwich without me).  I decided to order out for dinner instead of cooking, so I could read and take a nap Saturday afternoon. When they didn’t do what I asked, I remembered that was on them and instead of yelling I sat down and read a book until they did what I asked. They lost TV or fun time, not me (mostly). We watched a little Moana together, and I enjoyed the peace of the evenings with my book. I love my evenings with my husband, but I’m an introvert so I enjoy the alone time too!

Ok, not totally alone…

Sunday morning was one of those times that I almost let my mind carry me completely away. I asked my oldest daughter to feed the dog breakfast, which usually isn’t her responsibility, but her sister was doing another task. She started complaining about how she doesn’t like the smell of the dog food and put up a battle about getting the job done. I was ticked – I mean really, just feed the dog! She was the kid who begged the most to have the dog in the first place. What really made me angry though was my thinking. I thought she should want to feed the dog, that she shouldn’t complain or resist, that she was disrespectful and rude and disobedient. This thinking made me so angry that I was still mad when we started our virtual church Zoom meeting. And then the sermon was on love. As soon as I started hearing the words of 1 Corinthians 13, I remembered who I was and who I wanted to be. She didn’t have to want to feed the dog, or obey happily, or not complain. None of that is what made me angry with her, and I could choose to love her regardless of how she acted. I can train her to respond better in the future and love her at the same time. No matter what she does, I can act in love and feel love for her because of who I am in God. Her actions aren’t what made me angry – my thoughts about her actions did. And when I knew that I didn’t want to be angry but to love her in my correction, I went to her and apologized for being angry at her. We hugged and she apologized for her complaining. Acting in love is who I want to be, and I just needed a quick reminder to reset my mind.

That’s my baby!

Managing your mind is some of the most powerful work you can do because your thoughts produce the results in your life. You can do this work – capture your thoughts, work through them, and find ways to choose new thoughts and practice them into beliefs. This is work you absolutely can do alone. But, if you need help finding your way, that’s what a coach is for – and I’m here to help if you need me! Let me know in the comments below if you want to do a trial coaching session and we’ll find a time for you. And if you’ve also found some great ways to manage your mind, please share in the comments below!

Ever have those times where you feel like you’re ready to fly off the handle and you don’t really know why? We often attribute it to “I’m just feeling hormonal” or “I must be PMS’ing”. Then we grit our teeth, muscle through our interactions with our spouse, our kids, and our coworkers, and wait for the storm to pass. And since it often does, we think that it must have been our hormones that were in charge of our feelings. But I want to offer you a different perspective…

Now, let me be crystal clear: as a gynecologist, I believe that hormonal medications are useful tools and can be very helpful in managing the ups and downs of hormonal changes in a woman’s life. I prescribe hormones all the time for a variety of needs, and they generally work in the way we expect they will. But as a holistic practitioner, I do not believe that every difficult emotional situation we deal with should be medicated away or blamed on hormones. Hormones are simply chemical messengers that communicate from one organ to another, and our sex hormones (which are the ones we blame for emotional upset) are no different. We experience them differently in different phases of our lives than others (think puberty and menopause), but they are still just chemical messengers. And because we are complex integrated beings with life situations and past trauma and stressors and celebrations and tragedies, we can experience our hormones differently depending on our own unique lives. If you are experiencing difficulty with how you are experiencing your hormonal changes regularly, please talk to your gynecologist about this. But a lot of women have occasional times that seem to be really out of character and these can be tough to navigate. For this type of situation, I offer that these times should get your attention because your body is trying to tell you something. Let me give you an example from my own life.

For the past week and a half, I’ve known something was different this month. I used to be one of those women who didn’t think too much about my cycles – they came when they were supposed to, I didn’t suffer with them much, I made sure I had effective contraception when I wasn’t trying to get pregnant and I took an occasional ibuprofen when I needed it. I know, lucky me! In truth, I think I wasn’t really paying much attention to myself, and the physical sensations I felt I could explain, so I took them in stride. But now in my 40’s I’m noticing that some months are amplified, more of every symptom seems to be there. Sometimes it’s really uncomfortable, and because I rarely take medication I notice when I feel bad enough to think about taking something. Now with a teen in the house, I’m paying even closer attention because I’m noticing that my cycles are starting to sync up with hers.

I started noticing some unusual physical symptoms last week. Not to be indelicate, but I’m super regular to the point that I know around what time I’ll need the bathroom each morning. It’s rarely a big deal because I take psyllium fiber for the health benefits so the go is easy too, but even before I was taking it my bowels just didn’t give me any trouble. Last week, I got off schedule. For several days, I didn’t know what was happening and my schedule was totally strange. And, I was gassy and bloated and uncomfortable – but I hadn’t changed anything. I went to the teenager and started asking questions about when her period was coming, for which I got a strange look and a vague answer (she’s not used to tracking yet). I’ve been extra tired, where even when I slept for what should have been enough time, I was still getting up angry at the alarm clock. One night, I had so much pain in my lower belly that I curled up in bed with a heating pad to sleep.

Some months are like this. The symptoms may vary, but whatever they are they are more intense and bothersome than usual. I know a lot of you have felt this way and are wondering what should be done about it because it’s not pleasant. But here’s what I want to suggest: What if your body is trying to tell you something? What if you’re experiencing more discomfort because your body is trying to get you to pay attention to what you need? Here’s what I’ve observed in my life and the lives of many of the women I take care of. We have a tendency to be the caretakers – for our families, for our friends, for others. And sometimes the needs of others are very demanding, so we often put ourselves at the bottom of the priority list. When everyone else is fed and care for, we figure that then we can take care of ourselves. And many times, we don’t get to the end of our list. So when things are extra challenging (like during a global pandemic), we hustle harder to take care of everyone and spend even less attention and care on ourselves. For me, between the stress of working in medicine during the pandemic, running our homeschool, managing our teacher, caring for the kids, trying to maintain closeness with my husband, building my life coaching practice, writing the blog and updating the YouTube channel, and managing my anger and sadness in our current climate of racial injustice, I am just wrung out. Right now, at least. It’s not all the things I’m doing, because I like most of the things I’m doing, and the optional ones are probably some of the ones I enjoy the most! But all the thoughts that are swirling around about the more challenging responsibilities are taking a toll because I haven’t been managing them as well as I need to. And that is what I’m seeing show up in my body this month.

So what do I do? The first step is to breathe and give myself some grace. I have to acknowledge that this is a time that for me that is unlike any I’ve seen before, and I’m figuring it out. We all are, whether we’re in the office or hospital seeing patients with COVID, or being at home more than we ever wanted with kids who are making it hard to get work done and are eating every available snack in the house so everything is gone before the next planned grocery trip. The next step is to double down on doing what I know I need to do to support myself. I have to be super strict about bedtime because getting loose with the TV time at night always bites me in the butt in the morning. I plan my meals and drink my water. I take my immune-boosting supplements because Lord knows I need all these things to stay healthy right now. I evaluate and re-evaluate my calendar and take off things that are unnecessary so that I can read and rest so I don’t feel dragged by my schedule. There’s a lot that isn’t really optional unless I want to quit my job and run away from home (I don’t). So when I feel my body reflecting my mind, I know I have to be even more intentional about managing my thinking and my schedule so I’m taken care of, even as I take care of others.

What do you do when you feel like you’re having a crazy-hormonal time? How do you cope? Please share in the comments below!

And, if you’re having trouble managing your mind alone, that’s what I help people do in one-on-one coaching sessions! If you’d like to set up a time for coaching help, I have a few remaining slots. I’m still taking a few clients without charging while I’m building my practice. Please comment below if you’d like to set up a time and I’ll reach out to you directly. I’d love to help!

This is the last class in the Finding Fullness weight loss class – join me!

For those of you who read last week’s post, you know a lot has been happening for our family. If you didn’t read it, let me catch you up…

A little over a week ago, my son was called nigger while riding his bike in our neighborhood.  And while we received a lot of support and love from many both in our neighborhood, our family and friends, and in our social networks, a lot of restorative work had to be done to help our children navigate the ugly reality of the situation. We did it and continue to do it.  Yet still, we have to go to work, we’re all living through this pandemic, and we must navigate the realities of the racial climate everywhere we go – work, grocery shopping, online. Never mind that we have normal life to live too! It can be exhausting, overwhelming, terribly tiring.

But it doesn’t have to be.  And no, I’m not going to give you some kumbaya hopeful thoughts to try to switch your brain out of feeling tired and overwhelmed. There are ways to change our thinking, and being in charge of our brains is one of the most powerful skills we can develop. We can choose our thoughts and change how we feel and engage with our world, and that’s what I teach in my coaching practice.

But tough emotions are part of the whole human package. If we are whole, we will feel rage, disappointment, frustration, sadness, hopelessness, and many more emotions as we live in this world. If we don’t, we’re very likely trying not to feel those things and the act of resistance to feeling emotions is exhausting in itself. But I want to teach you a little practice I use to help myself get a moment of breathing room when I’m feeling any or all of this.  What I do is make space where it seems there isn’t any to be found. The best part is that it doesn’t take long to do. You can do it anytime and support yourself when you need it. You might have even tried this before and have forgotten how to do it. Let me walk you through this and see if you get a little relief…

First, sit comfortably. It doesn’t really matter where – you can be sitting at your desk, on your couch, on the floor. Wherever you are, just stop moving for a minute. Close your eyes. Feel yourself sitting and the sensation of the floor or chair touching you. Notice the contact between you and what’s under you, the effect of gravity on your body. Feel the presence of your body in the space. Scan from your feet to your head, not to change anything, but just to notice each part where it is. Move up one part at a time all the way to the top of your head. When you get there, turn your attention to your breath. Notice the flow of air into your lungs, and out of your lungs. Inhale deeply to the bottom of your chest, and exhale completely, allowing the air to leave as if you’re wringing out a cloth. Do this two more times. Now, open your eyes gently and allow the calm to wash over you for a moment. Take as long as you have to feel this relaxation.

Here’s the best news: You can take parts of this and do them anytime. I’ve been in the middle of a meeting and practiced the breath. I’ve been in the midst of a heated conversation and practiced feeling my body. The more you take a moment and practice these techniques, the easier they are to use whenever you need them. For now, just take one minute and practice again.  And take your calm with you wherever you go next!

What do you do to get a breather in the midst of everything you have going on? Did you find a moment in this practice? Please share in the comments below!